Documentary Film Project Overview
The Resource Center for Women and Ministry and the Black Feminist Film School are producing a documentary film that will tell the story of the life and work of African American quilter, educator, and community organizer Jereann King Johnson. A long-time North Carolina resident, Johnson pieces together people, organizations, and resources into racial and social justice. For Johnson, quilting is a dynamic metaphor for living, for community development, and for creative expression; quilting involves putting together often-discarded pieces to make something new.
Using archival footage and interviews with Johnson and her colleagues and friends, we will create and distribute a one-hour (56:46) documentary film.
About Jereann King Johnson
Jereann King Johnson grew up in Southwest Georgia during the Jim Crow era. As a child, she slept under homemade quilts, and soon her mother and grandmother taught her to sew and quilt. When Johnson was nine years old, her mother taught her to piece four-square, nine-square, and half-square triangle blocks. They made quilts from old curtain pieces and scraps from dress-making. After college and graduate school in Washington, D.C. Johnson moved to North Carolina to work for WVSP, a community-based, public broadcast station radio in Warrenton, NC. Though she was new to radio, she learned to produce children’s programs, public affairs programs, and jazz programs.
During the late 1970’s, Johnson rediscovered her passion for quilting when the Carolina Lily Quilt pattern caught her eye in a McCall’s pattern book. Johnson bought the pattern and made the blocks with leftover African prints from clothes she had made.
In collaboration with several North Carolina quilters, Johnson helped launch the African American Quilt Circle in 1997 in Durham, NC, and the Heritage Quilters in 2001 in Warrenton, NC. Johnson and her fellow quilters work to preserve and highlight African American quilting traditions; they also speak to the present moment by creating quilts that artistically portray historic and current events. One such quilt of Johnson’s is called “Hope in Impossible Odds.” Made with black and white cotton and red linen, it depicts a figure behind bars against a swirling black-and-white background. In addition to quilting, the Heritage Quilters work directly in the community by leading community tours, working with the schools, and organizing a giving circle that funds scholarships and youth field trips.
In 2018 Johnson received the Old North State Award. She was among fifteen North Carolinians honored by Governor Roy Cooper for their efforts to preserve African American heritage and culture.
In recent years, Johnson has been part of a community effort in Warren County to re-enact a 1921 trial of the “Norlina 16,” a group of Black men who were wrongfully accused and convicted. (Two additional men didn’t make it to trial; they were lynched, killed by a mob.) Johnson worked with playwrights and local community members to write and perform monologues from the perspectives of individuals involved in the trial. In conjunction with the performances, Johnson also organized a series of five panel discussions called “Liberating Futures: Erasures, Reckonings, and Transformations.”
In other community organizing roles, Johnson currently sits on a monument committee in Warrenton to recommend what should replace a Confederate statue that was removed in 2020. Johson was also involved in 40th anniversary commemorations of the 1982 protests of the dumping of PCBs in Warren County, largely thought of as the beginning of the environmental justice movement.
In 2023 Jereann helped with the planning for Kindred Spirits: A Convergence of African American Quilters. This inaugural conference took place over Juneteenth weekend, 2023. Johnson’s wisdom, guidance, and experience contributed to the success of the event, with 50 conference attendees and 450 visitors to the conference’s pop-up quilt show, Deconstructing the Mammy Archetype Through African American Quilt Work.
Jereann King Johnson has a legacy of artistic creation and working for equality. In the film, we will document the many ways that Jereann King Johnson has been a pivotal figure in her community and beyond. We will show the ways she connects people, encourages artistic expression, preserves and contributes to a fiber arts tradition, and works for justice.